Category: Website redesign

It is hard for me to believe, but it was one year ago today that we launched this new website!  On September 14, 2017, James Wood began our flow of news with a welcoming blog post – and just a few days later the site was heavily used as part of our massive 25th Anniversary celebration. It was the culmination of a rather insane several months in which a whole crew of people within the Internet Society, as well as at our partners Moving Brands and ATTCK, all burned countless hours to make this site a reality.

One year later, we’ve published over 500 news articles and blog posts; published over 120 new resources and tutorials; promoted many events, and maintained a consistent flow of content on the critical issues affecting the Internet.

We’ve built campaign pages, integrated video and graphics (ex. our GIR page), showcased the amazing work our Chapters are doing, integrated social components (ex. our IoT page and Instagram), and pushed the limits of how many links any sane person should have on a page. I continue to be impressed by the beauty of pages like our Issues page (just move your cursor over the boxes) – or pages like our 2018 Action Plan with all its different rows and backgrounds.

And… it all works great on mobile devices – and we did it all in three languages!

Now, it wasn’t all smooth sailing, of course. As I wrote in some of the posts about our website redesign, we had our share of challenges. We went through three different search solutions until we found a system that worked. We initially had hundreds of thousands of 404 errors while we got redirects in place. We had some serious speed issues that made working on the site … sooooooooo…. incredibly… sssssssssssllllllllllooooooooowwwwwwwww… until we moved to a new hosting provider in June 2018.

But at this point I can say that overall we are definitely pleased with both the front end you see as visitors – and the back end we use to administer the site.

We are NOT done yet!

Launching a site is a long journey. There are still many changes and new features we want to introduce. We have a “timeline” feature we hope to be rolling out soon. We are working on a way to add interactive maps. There are some accessibility issues we still need to address. And we’re always working on increasing speed and providing a better user experience. Plus, we want to see how we can better integrate this main site with a few of our other affiliated sites.

There is a great team of people who have helped make this happen over the past year, and I look forward to working with them and many others to see what we can do with this site over the next year.

Our goal is to deliver on that mission for the site I outlined back in June 2017:

Our website is a driving force in realizing our mission of an open Internet for everyone. It empowers all who care about a free and safe Internet and inspires action to make a positive difference.

It demonstrates our global impact, promotes our point of view, and provides definitive resources on the news, technologies, and policies that shape the Internet – today and tomorrow.

It delivers a focused and engaging experience that connects with a breadth of individuals, organizations and influencers. It extends our reach, supports our community, and grows our membership, creating a foundation for building a stronger Internet.

We want to help you all who are reading this to work with us to help shape the future of an Internet that is open, globally connected and secure.

I welcome any comments and feedback on this site – you can email me at york@isoc.org or leave them on our issue tracker on Github.

Thank you for visiting this site, sharing our information, taking action – and helping us all to #ShapeTomorrow!

The post Celebrating One Year With Our New Website appeared first on Internet Society.

As you may have noticed, our shiny new website has some speed issues. It is slow for many visitors. Over the past few months we’ve worked on a number of potential changes to improve the site performance. One big change we’re making is to move to a different hosting provider.

That change will happen tomorrow – Tuesday, 19 June 2018 at 13:00 UTC.

Assuming all goes well, you shouldn’t really notice – except that the site should be faster! But if you happen to be browsing the site around 13:00 UTC, you might see some glitches on pages while the DNS magic happens and we change to pointing to the new server.

Once we’ve made this migration, I’ll write more about what we have done and how it has helped our site’s performance. Meanwhile, I just wanted to give a quick alert about this impending change to anyone viewing our site.

The post Alert – Web server host migration on June 19, 2018 appeared first on Internet Society.

As we built our new website, one of my own guiding principles was “POSSE“, a content publishing model from the “IndieWeb” movement. The idea is:

Publish on your
Own
Site,
Syndicate
Elsewhere

Essentially, make sure you own your own content – and then share it out onto other sites and services. (See the IndieWeb page about POSSE for more discussion.) Make your own website the “hub” for all your content, and then have spokes going out to all the other places where people might discover and learn about your content.

To me, this model is the best way to support the principles of the open Internet, while engaging people in the places where they already are.

Why does this matter?

We aren’t just publishing reports, papers, blog posts and articles for the sake of talking about what we are doing.

We are publishing content to bring about change that ensures the Internet remains open, globally connected, and secure. As we said in our vision statement for the new website:

Our website is a driving force in realizing our mission of an open Internet for everyone. It empowers all who care about a free and safe Internet and inspires action to make a positive difference.

Our website exists in support of our mission, of our 2018 Action Plan, and of our campaigns to shape the Internet of tomorrow.

But of course, once we publish content, the challenge is to get people to actually READ (and share) that content.

Sadly, we’ve not yet been able to convince everyone on the Internet to set www.internetsociety.org as their home page! (Have you done that yet? Would you consider it?)

So…. we need to share / syndicate our content out to the places where people may discover that content.

We need to go where people are.

WordPress and RSS feeds

The good news about the POSSE model is that WordPress brings many advantages. For instance, it has strong support of RSS feeds, allowing our content to be easily used by viewers – and also published on other sites. You simply add “/feed/” to the end of any URL for a category, tag, or author and… ta da… a feed of all the stories. Super easy and simple.

Unfortunately, the use of dedicated RSS readers has fallen out of style. So while this is an awesome feature, fewer and fewer people are using it.

Thankfully, WordPress also supports a variety of plugins that help with sharing our content out to other channels.

Reaching new audiences

As we reach out to those other channels, it is critical for us to reach NEW audiences. If we only talk to the technical community out of which we emerged, or if we only speak to the “Internet governance” community in which we are involved, we will not be able to fully create the change we believe needs to happen.

We need to reach far larger audiences and help them discover what we are writing about. We need to reach the people who don’t know what “IoT” is – and help them understand why we need it secure by default. We need to reach people in areas without Internet connectivity – and help them understand how community networks can help. We need to reach people who can influence policy makers – and help their regulators understand how the Internet works, and how decisions around the Internet need to involve all sectors of society.

We need many people to take action.

Our ongoing work with the news media is a key part of reaching new audiences. We have had great success in this, and we will continue to expand our efforts. This is critical to our work.

Similarly, we also reach new audiences through building relationships with other media sites to get our articles published (or re-published/syndicated) on those sites. This can bring our ideas to whole new audiences that have not seen our site or even heard of the Internet Society.

But there has also been a large shift in how people discover news and content. For example, recent reports from the Pew Research Center found that 67% of Americans get at least some of their news from social media. For some groups and demographics, the percentage is even higher. Similar research from Pew showed a median of 35%  of people globally getting news daily through social media.

Sharing out to social channels

Given these trends, it is critical for us to get our content out into the social channels where it can be found – and shared. Whenever we publish an article or blog post, we typically share it to at least:

• one or more Twitter accounts
• our Facebook page(s)
• our LinkedIn profile
• our Google+ page

(See our list of social channels.)

If we look a why we use each of these channels:

• Twitter has consistently been an excellent way to reach people across a very wide range of social segments and industries. We also find news media see our content, as do policy makers, ISOC members and more.
• Facebook gives us the potential to reach over 2 billion users (per Facebook’s Q4 2017 monthly average users) around the world. It has the largest reach of any of the currently available platforms.
• LinkedIn has been a way to share out content out to a professional and business-oriented audience.
• Google+ historically was a way to reach some elements of our technical audience, although we’ve seen the level of engagement drop there significantly over the past year or two.

The sharing aspect is a key element. As the Pew Research study showed, people are more likely to trust news and links they see from their friends and family. So enabling people to share our content with others is critical.

Now, we don’t only “broadcast” out our content into our social channels. These channels are also one way we gather feedback and comments from people about our content.

We also do use other ways to engage with people in those channels. For instance, our recent polls on Twitter related to IoT and consumer rights. But the distribution of published content remains a major reason why we use the channels.

Sharing out to other channels

Beyond these social channels, we also syndicate and share our content out to other channels on a case-by-case basis. Some of those include:

• Email lists– We have a wide range of email lists available to Internet Society members. (Membership is free – join today!) Some include Chapter leaders or Organization members. Some are for our Special Interest Groups (SIGs). Others are for open discussion such as the “Internetpolicy” list or the Connect Open Forum. Our challenge here is that with the volume of content we publish, we want to share carefully so we don’t overwhelm people’s inboxes.
• Medium– We sometimes cross-post articles to our Medium account, although increasingly we are developing specific content for the site.
• CircleID– For many of our technical and policy folks, we have found that re-publishing our posts on CircleID (under individual author’s names) has brought the information strong additional visibility

Occasionally, we will also post content to some of the sites that aggregate links and provide news listings such as:

• Hacker News – our developer-focused and very technical articles often do well here.
• Reddit – some of our content fits in well in different sub-reddits.

We also have used our Instagram account for some campaigns, too.

Future channels

We are always watching for future channels where we should be engaging with people. One of the critical threads of the Internet Invariants is:

There are no permanent favourites.

Remember MySpace? or FriendFeed? or Jaiku? or… USENET?

The channels where people discover and engage with content today are not the same channels they used five years ago – and will probably not be the same channels people use five years in the future.

Facebook and Twitter are where a significant amount of people get their social news today – but will they still be the leaders in five years? Will enough people get upset at today’s platforms that they will actually engage in using new, alternative platforms?

As I look around at where people are engaging, I wonder whether we should do more with:

• Messaging apps– Should we share content out to a WhatsApp group chat? Or into Snapchat’s Discover area? Or WeChat or Line? Or some of the apps like Wire or Telegram focusing on security?
• News apps– We are seeing that news apps/services from Apple News, Google AMP, and Facebook Instant Articles are all making the mobile user experience more convenient. I’ve avoided doing anything with these because they are more proprietary than I’d like, but should we?
• WordPress.com– Our use of WordPress enables us to also have our content flow out into the WordPress.com site to be discovered by others. Should we do more with this?

Or … whatever will be next? Will it be some blockchain mechanism? or…?

It’s hard to know. And to engage in new channels – and do it well – also involves some commitment of staff time and resources. But we will continually be watching, and evolving how we share our content.

POSSE for the open Internet

Our commitment continues to be that we will Publish our content on our Own Site in support of the open Internet. And we will Syndicate that content Elsewhere.

We will go where the people are today – and we will keep watching and explore where the people will be tomorrow.

Our goal is to continue to empower people to take action in support of an open, globally connected and secure Internet.

The future of the Internet is up to each of us. We must work together to #ShapeTomorrow.

Image credit: Tom Kelly on Flickr CC BY NC ND

The post Building Our New Website: POSSE and Sharing on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and More appeared first on Internet Society.

As we continue to evolve our new website, I will provide more regular updates to all of you visiting our site. Today’s topics are: improved search; much faster speed; and an open issue tracker.

Searching our content

For all of you who contacted us saying “I can’t find anything” on the site through the search box (the magnifying glass in the upper right corner of the screen), we’ve got some great news – it should now work!   We tried two different search solutions for all our content before we moved on to a third solution that we find works well. Please do let us know if you are still having challenges finding content.

Speeding up the site

The site should now be much faster! We recently deployed some caching servers in front of our site and the speed should be dramatically improved for most all of the pages. This was very important to us as we want to provide the best user experience.

Tracking open issues

If you do find anything wrong with the new site, we have an open issue tracker on Github. You can visit the repository at:

https://github.com/InternetSociety/web-site-feedback

and the actual list of open issues is at: https://github.com/InternetSociety/web-site-feedback/issues

You are welcome to open issues there and we’ll be notified. If you don’t have a Github account and for some reason you don’t want to create one, you are always welcome to email me directly at york@isoc.org.

We welcome any and all feedback about the site. Thank you for visiting – and for supporting the work of the Internet Society to ensure that the Internet remains open, globally connected, secure, and trusted for everyone.

The post Building Our New Website: Improved search, speed, and an open issue tracker appeared first on Internet Society.

As we continue to evolve our new website, I will provide more regular updates to all of you visiting our site. Today’s topics are: improved search; much faster speed; and an open issue tracker.

Searching our content

For all of you who contacted us saying “I can’t find anything” on the site through the search box (the magnifying glass in the upper right corner of the screen), we’ve got some great news – it should now work!   We tried two different search solutions for all our content before we moved on to a third solution that we find works well. Please do let us know if you are still having challenges finding content.

Speeding up the site

The site should now be much faster! We recently deployed some caching servers in front of our site and the speed should be dramatically improved for most all of the pages. This was very important to us as we want to provide the best user experience.

Tracking open issues

If you do find anything wrong with the new site, we have an open issue tracker on Github. You can visit the repository at:

https://github.com/InternetSociety/web-site-feedback

and the actual list of open issues is at: https://github.com/InternetSociety/web-site-feedback/issues

You are welcome to open issues there and we’ll be notified. If you don’t have a Github account and for some reason you don’t want to create one, you are always welcome to email me directly at york@isoc.org.

We welcome any and all feedback about the site. Thank you for visiting – and for supporting the work of the Internet Society to ensure that the Internet remains open, globally connected, secure, and trusted for everyone.

The post Building Our New Website: Improved search, speed, and an open issue tracker appeared first on Internet Society.

How do you build a multilingual website? What are the things you should be thinking about? In my last post in this series, I wrote about our need for a multilingual editor (and we now have some GREAT candidates!). But there’s obviously much more to a site than just having a person on board. This week, Joly MacFie of our New York Chapter pointed me to this excellent video from the recent WordCamp Helsinki 2017 event titled “The User Experience Perspective of Multilingual and Multi-regional Websites“:

What I like about this is how the speaker, Thomas Hurd, lays out the different options in how to build a multilingual site and explores the overall strategy you need to think about for a multilingual site. The video does not dive into the technology as much as it raises the larger issues you need to consider. It’s easy to understand even if you don’t know much at all about WordPress or multilingual sites in general.

For the record, right now we’re pursuing the option he calls “Non-specific content, Multiple languages”. We are also planning to continue what we are doing today with using directories off of the URL for each language. In other words, we’ll have:

• www.internetsociety.org   – the English pages
• www.internetsociety.org/es/  – the Spanish pages
• www.internetsociety.org/fr/   – the French pages

We agree with Thomas Hurd that this is one of the best methods for the user experience.

From a technical perspective, we are planning to implement the multilingual aspects of the site using the WPML plugin for WordPress.

Oh, and we’re NOT using flags!

If you are interested in helping us build this new multilingual site, consider applying for the Multilingual Editor position. I’m already interviewing people who have applied, but new candidates are welcome.

P.S. This article is part of our series on our website redesign in 2017. Please do follow along on our journey!

The post Building Our New Website: A video about the user experience of multilingual websites appeared first on Internet Society.

Our current website is a multilingual embarrassment.

Have you looked at our French home page lately? Or Spanish? Or Russian? Chinese? Arabic?

You probably haven’t, according to our website statistics, and for a good reason: those home pages have not changed much in 2 years! 

They all still show an image that we used on our English-language home page two years ago. The events are outdated. The feature boxes are old. The “news” is old. The menus are no longer synchronized with the main English home page.

And if you follow links from those home pages, you will find that you soon run out of pages in those languages. What we have is more of a “facade” for each language.

In truth we should just take those pages down – and I may do that soon.

The original intent was an excellent one: make our website content available in all six United Nations languages.

But the result we have today shows a fundamental truth about multilingual websites:

• One-time translation is simple – maintaining the translated content over time is the challenging part!

It’s relatively “easy” to translate a page or a set of pages once. We can send them to a translation firm. We can ask staff to help. In our case we can ask our Chapters in a particular region to help.

And this can work for individual reports. Or tutorials. Or other static pages.

But it does NOT work for a dynamic website where we are publishing new content on a daily basis.

Stepping Back – and Doing It Right

As a global organization with 120+ chapters and tens of thousands of individual members scattered around the world, we know that our website content must be available in more than just English.

To deliver on the vision of our new website having global impact, we have had to step back and take a hard look at how we support multiple languages on our main site.

The critical point is that we must deliver more than a “facade.” The versions of the site in other languages need to be strong and in sync with the English site as much as possible.

Early on in the website redesign process, we realized that to do this right we need at least one person dedicated to ensuring synchronization between the languages. Someone who makes sure the home pages and menus are updated. Someone who can ensure that when we publish news in English, we also publish information in other languages.

More than that, we need a person who is bringing in content from other languages. Our site cannot just be English content translated into, say, Spanish. It should also include Spanish content that is translated into English.

Starting Slowly

Adding a person (or multiple people) like this into our communications team and editorial workflow is something new. We need to prove to ourselves that this model will work.

And so we’re starting slowly. As we bring the new website online over the next few months, we are going to start with French and Spanish. These two languages cover significant areas of the world where we have members and chapters. I also believe there is a high probability we can find someone who is fluent in BOTH French and Spanish, as well as English.

If you think you are a good fit for this role, or you know someone who might be, our Multilingual Editor job description is now posted online with more details. We’re accepting applications now and will continue until we fill the role.

Please note – this is a 12-month contract position. We want to prove that this model of working on a multilingual site will work.

In the best case, we’ll find that this model works and we’ll look to continue it. And, if it works, we will probably want to add additional Multilingual Editors in 2018 and beyond to cover more languages.

However, we may find that the model doesn’t work and that we need to try a different approach. This position may end at that time.

So we’re looking for someone willing to join us on this adventure and help us find a good path forward.

Apply Now

To learn more about the responsibilites and qualifications, please read the listing for the 12-month Multilingual Editor position. Do note that we are building our new site on WordPress and using the WPML plugin. Experience with WPML would be a huge plus.

We are looking, too, for someone excited to work in a fast-paced environment. When we have news that needs to go out, we’ll be looking for this person to help us get that news out in French and Spanish. Sometimes we will have plenty of lead time – other times we are publishing right in the moment. The ability to work quickly and with the rest of the team will be critical.

Instructions on how to apply can be found in the position description.  We’re eager to get started – and we need someone on board soon to help with our website redesign over the next few months.

Please do me a favor, though. If you are not fluent in all three languages (English, French and Spanish), in both written and spoken communication, please do not bother applying. Someday we might be in a position to have editors for each language, but that is not today.

I’m excited to try this new model for a multilingual website. Please help us reach more people in more languages by either applying yourself – or sharing this information with others who might be a good fit. Thank you!

P.S. This article is part of our series on our website redesign in 2017. Please do follow along on our journey!

The post Building Our New Website: Seeking a Multilingual Editor to help us speak more globally appeared first on Internet Society.

In the early stages of our process to build a new Internet Society website, we developed a “vision” for what we wanted the new website to be. Last year we spoke with many people throughout the larger Internet Society community. We spoke with staff, with Chapter leaders, with partner organizations, with individual members and many more.

As we launch the “beta” of the new website this week, I want to share with you the vision that emerged out of all of those aspirations:

Our website is a driving force in realizing our mission of an open Internet for everyone. It empowers all who care about a free and safe Internet and inspires action to make a positive difference.

It demonstrates our global impact, promotes our point of view, and provides definitive resources on the news, technologies, and policies that shape the Internet – today and tomorrow.

It delivers a focused and engaging experience that connects with a breadth of individuals, organizations and influencers. It extends our reach, supports our community, and grows our membership, creating a foundation for building a stronger Internet.

What do you think of that? Does that resonate with you? Does that sound like guiding principles for an Internet Society website?

The post Building Our New Website: A vision for the new site appeared first on Internet Society.

Today I’m excited to give you a glimpse into our future! As James Wood recently wrote, we have been working on a new website that makes it tremendously easier to find information and take action on issues important to you. I also shared the vision we have for this new site.

The big news is this: we have now released an “early beta” version of the new site that shows the overall design direction and look-and-feel. It is important to note: Most of the site is INCOMPLETE. Most links will not work and many pages are missing.

The feedback we seek right now includes the questions:

• Does the overall design work for you in your region?
• Do you have any comments about what you see so far?

Many technical aspects of the site will be changing as will much of the content. With that in mind, here it is:

https://beta.internetsociety.org/

You can view the site on either your desktop/laptop or on mobile devices.

As you can see, the new site is very different from today’s site. Our goal is to make it simpler, easier-to-use and more action-oriented. Beyond the home page, here are a few other pages to explore to get a sense of where we are going:

• the news page – and the various articles. I’ll write more in a future post about where we are going with “news” in the new site.
• the Asia Pacific Regional page. This was an example of a “region” that we built. We still need to work with our Asia Pacific Regional Bureau to update the content… so ignore the specific content and look more at how it is organized.
• the “About the Internet” page. This is an example of the type of “special” page that will be possible in the new site.
• the “About the Internet Society” page. This is where many of the pieces of information that were previously found in some of the menus will now be found. You get to this page from a link in the footer.

There are a few other pages on the beta site right now that you can find through your exploration. We will be developing “in the open” from this point forward, and will be updating this beta site periodically with both new designs and content.

Providing Your Feedback

With this beta launch, we are also providing a public mechanism for you to leave your comments. We have opened up a Github repository where we are asking people to use the “issue tracker” to leave comments:

https://github.com/InternetSociety/beta-site-feedback

This provides a public, transparent mechanism where anyone can leave comments, respond to other comments – and see how we are responding to various comments.

We welcome you to leave your feedback there. It does require that you have a Github account (you can create a free account), but the advantage is that it is an easy-to-use issue tracker on a site where many people already have accounts. I and another colleague will be the primary ones responding to feedback, but our development team will also be able to easily read the feedback. If you do not wish to create a Github account, you can also send me email, but I would prefer comments be left in the issue tracker.

Known Issues

As noted above, this is an “early beta” of the site. In fact, you might say it is a “very early beta” or even an “alpha” version. There are many known issues, including:

• Most links do not work.
• Many more pages need to be added.
• The URL structure will change.
• The items in the menus will change slightly as we adjust them.
• Images have not yet been optimized for low-bandwidth connections.
• The mobile interfaces need further development.
• Accessibility testing has not yet been performed.
• Social media sharing icons do not yet appear on the left side of pages.
• The filtering function on the news page is not yet implemented.
• The search function is not yet implemented.

Our main goal right now is to give you an initial view of where we are going with the site and to get any initial feedback.

Future Beta Periods

Over the next weeks and months we will be creating the new content and migrating content from the existing Internet Society website. There will be additional points at which we will be seeking feedback, including:

• ACCESSIBILITY TESTING – our site is planned to meet WCAG 2.0 AA accessibility guidelines. When ready, we will be seeking testing/feedback on the work we have done.

• BANDWIDTH TESTING – we are targeting the site to work over mobile devices on 3G connections. At a point in the development we will be seeking people to help us test how well it works on lower-bandwidth connections.

• MULTILINGUAL TESTING – later in July or August we will be bringing on the French and Spanish versions of the site. We will be seeking feedback from the community about how well those versions work in their regions.

We will provide updates when specific feedback is requested.

Continuing The Journey

With this beta site online, we now begin the challenging work of creating the new content, migrating content from the current site, and determining what to do with some of the content we choose not to migrate. My next few months will be spent with an enormous spreadsheet and working with our great team to make this a reality.

Being who I am, I will also be writing about this journey over the weeks and months ahead. Look for future blog posts from me explaining why we are making some of the changes; what some of the important new features are; what choice we made for our content management system (CMS) – and why; and so much more. I want to share more with you so that you can understand where we are going – and so that you can provide your feedback about what we are doing.

Watch for those blog posts – and join us in the journey to our new website!

The post Building Our New Website: Announcing our public “Beta” launch – view the new site today appeared first on Internet Society.